When 21-year-old Malaysia resident Christine Jiaxin Lee, who was studying at Sydney University in Australia, realized that she had an unlimited overdraft at Westpac Bank, she went on a multi-million-dollar spending spree for 11 months. An alert with the bank was triggered only after Lee transferred $1.15 million to her PayPal account over 14 transactions in one day. She spent vast amounts of money on designer goods from high-end brands, including Hermes, Dior, Chanel and Cartier. When she was finally arrested, she had racked up a whopping $4.6 million. However, when she went to court, Lee explained that she thought her parents had been depositing large sums of money into her bank account. In the end, prosecutors dropped charges against Lee after a similar case involving a man charged with fraud for withdrawing $2.1 million from ATMs was thrown out of court. The prosecution came to the conclusion that there was no deception on Lee’s part and the bank learned a very expensive lesson.
